It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot like Summer

Posted on May 26, 2012

In the morning, the sun beams straight through one of the big windows in our bedroom, flooding it with light from about 6am onward. Our bed is its target and warms beautifully, like a cake in an oven. This is fine by me. I love light. I love sleeping with all the windows wide open and waking up to the sun on my face. It reminds me of summers spent at our beach house, where the sun rises behind the water and shoots straight through the windows of one of the bedrooms. Of course Australian mid-summer sun is hot enough to make sleeping with it boring bossily down upon your face, quite impossible. It is the best kind of wake up call. It pushes you out of bed and into the cool of the beach house kitchen, for a cup of tea and surf-inspection through the binoculars. But late Spring sun over here is just balmy enough so as to kiss one awake with only a gentle insistence. It doesn’t force you out of bed, instead makes your final hours of slumber extremely enjoyable. If you’re me. If you’re SG, it’s irritating enough so as to rouse you and force you to rise with it, which is what the poor sod does on the evenings he gives in to my banging on about ‘natural light’ and ‘sunshine in the morning’ and we sleep with both blinds up. I have a feeling tonight the blinds will be down.

These past few days, the feeling of summer has crept into the air and made itself quite comfortable. The weather seems to have stabilised (touch wood) and the evenings are long and warm. Pallid and spray tanned flesh is out and about, Weiden’s new bubble tea shop (it acquired about five years after the rest of the world experienced the bubble tea boom) is pumping and, best of all, most notable of all, the biggest signal of sun-drenched things to come has sounded its horn. In a blinding flash of tropical colours and a clap of sweet, heady scents summer fruit has made its grand return to the supermarket. Nothing says summer like a box of mangoes, preferably purchased from a tiny stall on the side of the road. I am yet to track one down in Weiden, but when I do, you can mark my words, it will enjoy repeat custom. I am biding my time, waiting for the supermarket mangoes to ripen, so as not to repeat a recent nasty run-in with a rock-like avocado that did not yield to any amount of mashing for guacamole. In the mean time, the fruit bowl is filled with and the dining room consequently smells like, peaches and nectarines and sitting prominently next to the bowl, proud and perfectly shaped, is this afternoon’s snack: a lovely big watermelon.

Like you, I gauge summers entry by the amount of fresh fruit available. My other measurement is the opening of our local farmers markets! Though our winters are very short here in Texas, growing seasons still follow traditional patterns and we have to wait like everyone else.

Liv, here in Darwin at the Top End of Australia we are rushing headlong towards winter. Daytime temp down to 29, overnight a shivery 18. Lots of people are already wearing their woollies, although I have yet to see the first ugg boot of the season. I like cool but your -20 is a bit over the top ;-).